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Print version ISSN 0080-6234

Rev. esc. enferm. USP vol.39 no.3 São Paulo Sept. 2005

http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0080-62342005000300001

EDITORIAL

Care with life

When reflecting
upon the theme I would write about in this Editorial, two apparently disconnected
readings - Qual o tempo do cuidado? Humanizando os cuidados de Enfermagem(1)
(How much time for care? Humanizing Nursing care) and Ser pesquisador, ser editor,
ser autor(2) (Being a researcher, being an editor, being an author)
- led me to think about our daily life as professors and as researchers in Nursing.
I thought about how we hurry in order get our research projects finished in
time for meeting the deadlines established by the financing agencies, we hurry
to have our students finish their theses and dissertations within the set time
limit, we hurry to produce the adequate amount of articles with appropriate
quality for publication in periodicals with international circulation. I could
go on listing a series of other activities that have in the pace of time their
main manager. I also wondered what leads us to live our academic time within
this particular logic of time-living. Are we reacting to institutional or personal
demands of competitiveness and productivity? Or is it that the race against
the clock has been incorporated into our lifestyle in such a way that we have
lost the ability to realize that, little by little, we forgot how it is to live
that kind of time which, spontaneously, in our everyday relations, got us closer
to others, humanized us, by making sense of our actions, be them to teach, to
do research, to care, or simply to live?

The care we must
have with life requires from us a reflection on how we have been dealing with
the time we have and on the priorities that we have been setting among the various
things we need and want to do. We must learn how to combine both manners of
living time - the time measured by the clock beat and the time measured by the
heartbeat - so that, without neglecting our academic obligations, we are able
to care a bit more for ourselves and for our relations with those who surround
us. This way we will be humanizing our relations and being humanized by them.